This one was a perfect example. Average height and build, neither beautiful nor ugly, and wearing little make-up. Her facial features and complexion gave little clue as to her age; she could have been anything from late teens to late twenties. Anya was betting she was closer to the latter, but pretending to be younger.
Her clothes were decent quality but understated, revealing nothing of the body beneath, designed specifically not to attract attention. All of these things helped make her the classic ‘grey man’, the kind of person you could pass in the street a dozen times a day without even noticing.
Well, Anya had certainly noticed her now. Rising from her seat, a stack of textbooks in her arms and a takeaway cup of coffee from the shop across the road balanced on top, she headed straight for the young woman, as if to pass by her reading desk.
It was so quick it would have been missed by all but the most diligent of observers. With a slight tilt of the books, she allowed the coffee to topple off its precarious resting place, and straight onto her target.
It landed on her left shoulder, the lid coming free and causing the frothy contents to spray across her jumper and reading table.
‘Ow! What the hell?’ the young woman cried out, jumping to her feet and wiping a hand across her stained top as she glared accusingly at Anya. The coffee had cooled sufficiently that it had caused no real harm, though it was clear her outfit was ruined.
All eyes in the library were now on them, including Alex and Lauren’s.
‘Oh, no! I’m so sorry,’ Anya said, throwing on a fake look of concern, and affecting a thick Dutch accent. She’d chosen it on the basis that they were generally seen as a laid-back, genial people who weren’t inclined to start fights. ‘It just slipped out of my hand.’
The young woman looked as angry as Anya would be in her situation. ‘You know you’re not supposed to bring hot drinks in here, right?’
Anya feigned a look of surprise, moving forward to help wipe the coffee stains from her top. ‘I’m sorry, I—’
‘Back off, it’s cool. We’re good,’ the young woman said hastily, putting up her hands and backing away a step to prevent further interference. ‘Just chill.’
‘You okay, Morgan?’ Lauren asked, looking concerned for her friend. Around the room, quiet conversation was starting to resume as students went back to work.
Letting out an exasperated breath, Morgan nodded to Anya. ‘Just a little accident,’ she said, in a tone that was far less forgiving than her words. She pointed towards a sign for the restrooms. ‘I’ll be back in a minute, need to clean up a little.’
‘Want some help?’
Morgan shook her head. ‘Nah, I got this.’
‘Cool. I’ll be here, okay?’
Picking up her coat and bag, Morgan gave Anya a withering look. ‘Try to be more careful next time, huh?’
Anya nodded, then reached down to pick up the coffee cup as the young woman scurried off to the restrooms. She gave it a few moments before disposing of the cup in the nearest waste bin, then quietly heading in the same direction.
‘You’re doing well, Alex,’ she spoke into her radio as soon as she was in the corridor outside. She wasn’t normally one for massaging egos, but Alex was a civilian and probably in need of some encouragement. ‘Lauren will wait for her friend. You can stop talking to her now, but let me know if she tries to leave the library.’
He didn’t reply directly, as she knew he couldn’t, but she could hear his words as he commented on the minor scene she’d created. The phrase ‘bloody idiot bringing a coffee cup in here’ was used, as was ‘no respect for a place like this’. She felt certain it was directed at her rather than Lauren.
Still, disrespect was the least of her concerns. There was only one place she was going now. It was time to take care of her Agency friend.
Chapter 21
‘Goddamn it, what a fucking mess,’ Morgan Brooks said into the mirror as she reviewed the dark splatters of coffee that marked her top. She was alone in the restroom, and felt perfectly comfortable voicing her frustration.
Of all the dumbass things to happen, some random bitch spilling coffee down her really took the biscuit. It had taken no small measure of restraint to keep herself from knocking the older woman on her ass in front of the whole library, finally putting all those rigorous months of Agency combat training to the test.
As if it wasn’t bad enough being stuck on this detail for the past 18 months, babysitting the spoiled daughter of one of the Agency’s big players, pretending to be interested in the bullshit she was studying, pretending to like her. Pretending she didn’t resent her life of privilege, while Brooks herself was forced to act and dress like a bookish mouse. She’d be glad when the end of year rolled around and she could be relieved of this duty.
There was little she could do to salvage the top. A few dabs with a wet paper towel wasn’t going to get the stain out, and it wasn’t as if she could walk around in her underwear. There was nothing else for it – she’d have to go back to their dorm room and change.
‘Fuck my life,’ she said, tossing the wad of paper towels in the trash can.
The door creaked as someone entered. Perhaps Lauren had come to check up on her.
You’ve got to be kidding me, Brooks thought, taking in the sight of the older, dark-haired woman, the reason for her being here in the first place. She was standing by the doorway, looking right at her. What the hell did she want? If it was to offer another stammered apology, she’d find Brooks far less accommodating in private than she had been in public.
But she did no such thing. She didn’t say a word, in fact. An icy feeling trickled down Brooks’ spine. This situation was all wrong.
Something was on the ground by the woman’s feet. Looking down, Brooks watched as she calmly used her boot to wedge the rubber door stop into place, preventing anyone from entering.
That was when the pieces finally came together. The unfamiliar young man who had struck up a conversation with Lauren, the coffee spillage that had forced her to come in here, the woman who had appeared so timid now standing yards away with a very different look in her eyes.
She couldn’t believe she’d been complacent enough to fall for a ploy like this. Clearly 18 months of boredom and inactivity had eroded her situational awareness, made her slow to react.
Brooks thrust a hand into her bag, feeling for the concealed Glock 26 miniature pistol she always kept there.
The mysterious woman charged at her, covering the short distance from the door to the wash basins with frightening speed.
Closing her fingers around the weapon’s handle, Brooks pulled the gun free, and flicked the safety catch off. She had no idea who this woman was or why she’d sought her out, but her adversary had made her intentions quite plain.
As soon as she was taken care of, Brooks would press the panic button on her key chain, engaging the emergency evacuation protocol for Lauren. There would be questions to answer, of course, and her time as an undercover operative in this city was certainly at an end, but those were concerns for later.
Sighting the target, she pulled the trigger, bracing herself for the weapon’s formidable recoil. But her opponent’s hand had simultaneously shot upwards, grasped the Glock’s slide mechanism and yanked it backwards, almost tearing the gun from Brooks’ grip.
Instead of the sharp crack of a subsonic round, there was nothing at all, not even a click. With the slide forced into its rear position, the weapon’s mechanism was unable to engage, the firing pin stuck where it was no matter how hard she pulled the trigger.
Brooks reacted to this unexpected predicament with creditable speed. With the weapon neutralized, at least for now, she fell back on her unarmed combat training, lashing out with her free hand at the woman’s throat. Striking at the face was a waste of time and a quick way to break knuckles, but a good hard blow to the trachea could drop a target like a sack of bricks.
* * *
In the library reading room, the grunt
s and snarls of Anya’s fight were relayed to Alex’s earpiece with frightening clarity. The only thing he couldn’t tell was who was winning.
‘You okay?’ Lauren asked.
‘Yeah,’ he lied. ‘Just my phone going off.’ Thinking fast, he fished his phone out of his pocket and pretended to check his messages. ‘Sorry to be rude, but I need to make a quick call. Do you mind?’
The young woman shrugged. ‘Hey, don’t mind me. Go for it.’ She flashed a teasing smile, pointing to a sign that warned against the use of cell phones in the reading room. ‘But I’d go outside first.’
‘Thanks. Enough rule breakers already today, eh?’ he said, turning away.
‘Hey, Alex,’ Lauren called after him.
Alex turned again, trying to look more relaxed than he felt, and the young woman held out a hand.
‘You’ve still got something of mine.’
Alex glanced down at the book he was still holding, having quite forgotten about it. He handed the book over, hoping she didn’t notice the slight tremor in his hand.
Lauren nodded in gratitude. ‘Maybe I’ll see you around.’
Alex said nothing further as she turned away and took one of the reading desks. Quickly retreating to a quieter corner of the room, he wasted no time speaking into his radio.
‘Anya, what the fuck’s going on? Where are you?’
* * *
Her opponent was trying to strike at her throat and incapacitate her. A sound tactic, especially when up against someone physically larger and stronger than yourself. Anya was ready for it, having been through much the same training. The difference was that Anya had a lifetime of experience to back it up.
Batting the attempted strike aside while maintaining an iron grip on the Glock, she drove a knee into Brooks’ unprotected stomach, eliciting an instinctive change in posture to prevent another such blow. Capitalising on her opponent’s momentary weakness, Anya jammed a boot into her left knee with merciless ferocity, buckling it.
Brooks dropped to her knees, her grip on the gun slackening. Injured and immobilized, she could manage only an uncoordinated punch that caught her enemy a fleeting blow to the ribs.
For Anya, it felt like she’d just been hit with a sledgehammer. White light impinged her vision as her ribs exploded with pain. It took great self-control not to cry out, to keep her mind on her enemy. Injuries could be sorted out later. Winning the fight was all that mattered now.
Twisting sideways to avoid another strike that would surely drop her, she tore the gun from her enemy’s hand with a vicious kick, breaking Brooks’ trigger finger in the process.
Anya saw a flash of defiance in the young woman’s eyes even as she swept the gun around and caught her with a hard, solid blow to the base of her skull. There was no recovering from that. Brooks went down, landing hard on the tiled floor, a thin trickle of blood oozing from the cut at her neck.
Anya staggered for a moment, her breathing shallow, clutching at the countertop for support. She waited while she slowly regained her composure. She knelt down beside the young woman and felt the pulse at her neck. To her relief, it was fast and weak, but there.
The movies might show James Bond neatly incapacitating opponents with a deft blow to the back of the head, but the reality was far more dangerous and imprecise. Strike too hard and you risked a skull fracture and intracranial bleeding; strike too soft and you were left with an injured but very angry opponent. For that reason, Anya generally tried to avoid such tactics unless the victim’s survival wasn’t a priority. Still, needs must.
And in this case it seemed her gamble had paid off. Brooks would likely have a week or two in the hospital to look forward to when she woke up, but barring unexpected brain damage, she’d probably make a full recovery.
Anya didn’t have the luxury of hospitals to fall back on. She glanced at her reflection and wasn’t surprised to see a crimson stain spreading from the left side of her shirt. She closed her eyes and gently felt around the injury, searching for the telltale jagged lump that would tell her if she’d snapped a rib. Even this probing was painful indeed, but she could find no signs of more severe damage.
There was nothing to be done about the bleeding right now. The best she could manage was to pull her jacket closed and zip it up, though it was anyone’s guess how long it would take the blood to seep through.
Her thoughts were disturbed by the sound of Alex’s voice in her ear, hushed but filled with concern. ‘Anya, if you’re still alive, I’d really appreciate an update.’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, still having difficulty breathing properly. ‘Stop yelling in my ear.’
‘You sounded like you were murdering someone.’
Anya said nothing.
‘Jesus, tell me you didn’t—’
‘She’s alive,’ Anya asserted, unwilling to waste more time on the matter. ‘Do you have a visual on the target?’
‘Yeah, she’s in the reading room.’
‘Good. Get ready to move,’ Anya said, thrusting the compact Glock into her jacket pocket and pulling the dark wig off and running her fingers through her real hair.
‘Where, exactly?’
‘You’ll see. Just stick close to her.’
With that, she reached into the satchel she’d brought in with her and fished out a grey, cylindrical device with a simple fuse, pin and priming lever attached to one end. Pulling the pin out and releasing her grip on the priming lever to allow it to detach, Anya rolled the smoke grenade into the furthest toilet stall.
A second or so later, a loud hissing sound told her the chemicals had gone to work, and white smoke began to billow out of the stall, quickly forming a dense wall of artificial fog. Snatching up her satchel, Anya removed the rubber wedge, opened the door and strode out into the corridor.
She’d spotted the fire alarm on her way in, surrounded by angry red text warning users to break only in case of an emergency. A sharp blow with her elbow broke the protective glass plate covering the alarm, allowing her to reach in and pull the lever.
Chapter 22
Lauren Cain was just starting to type up some notes when the peaceful air of the reading room was shattered by the harsh blare of a fire alarm.
For the next couple of seconds, nothing much happened. Whatever conversation had been going on fell silent as students looked for any obvious signs of fire. Most of them had been through dozens of drills and false alarms over the years, often by fellow students playing pranks, and were perhaps hoping that the alarm would shut off quickly.
It didn’t, and when this fact became obvious, the senior staff member on duty at the information desk – a rotund little man with a red face and thinning, combed-over hair – began to address the room.
‘Everybody, I must ask that you make your way calmly outside through the emergency exits,’ he said in French, having to shout to be heard over the echoing electronic wail. ‘Please walk, don’t run!’
A collective groan passed through the room as students picked up bags and coats, and began to file out.
‘Damn it,’ Lauren said, closing down the laptop and replacing it in her bag, along with the notebooks she’d been working from.
She was reaching for her coat when Alex appeared, standing uncertainly over her as the evacuation unfolded.
‘This sort of thing happen a lot around here?’ he asked, looking unnerved. She didn’t blame him, being in a strange place with no friends around.
Lauren made a face. ‘You’d be surprised, especially around exam time.’ Throwing her coat over her shoulders, she stood up and glanced over at the corridor leading to the restrooms. ‘I’d better go get Morgan.’
‘Won’t she be outside already?’ he asked.
Lauren frowned, torn about what to do. Alex was most likely right. Morgan wasn’t stupid, and would probably have made her way outside with the rest of the students, but it went against her instincts to leave a friend unaccounted for at a time like this.
‘I guess so,’ she agreed
reluctantly, unable to shake the feeling that something wasn’t quite right. But realizing they couldn’t linger here, she added, ‘Come on. I’ll show you the way out.’
Lauren dug out her phone and tried dialling Morgan’s cell. To her dismay, the call rang out. Maybe the noise of the alarms had drowned out the ring tone, she tried to tell herself as they filed into the corridor outside the reading room.
That was when Lauren smelled it. Smoke. And as she turned right, she saw a grey haze drifting down the corridor, rolling along the ceiling in waves. This was no prank or scheduled drill, she realized. The building really was on fire.
Others had caught on too, and she heard a few frightened exclamations from her fellow students, their steps accelerating as they headed for the exits.
‘Oh, shit,’ Alex said, staring into the smoke.
Lauren punched in a rapid text message to Morgan and sent it off in record time.
Heading outside. Call me. L
She’d just shoved the phone into her back pocket when a woman came striding towards her. Tall, perhaps in her early forties, with short blonde hair and the authoritative stride of someone used to taking command of a situation.
‘Lauren Cain?’ the woman asked, her tone brisk and official.
Lauren blinked, shocked to hear that name spoken aloud. At her father’s insistence, she’d been using her mother’s name during her time here. No one knew who she really was.
‘What did you call me?’ she demanded, suddenly uncertain of what was happening. ‘Who are you?’
The woman took a step closer and lowered her voice. ‘Name’s Erin Forsyth, ma’am. I’m a field agent with the Paris embassy. Your father assigned me to your security detail.’
‘What security detail?’
‘Your father takes your safety very seriously,’ Forsyth assured her. ‘And so do we. I’m afraid you may be in danger here.’
Shadow Conflict Page 16